Elite und Exzellenz aus der Perspektive von Jugendlichen und ihren Peers an exklusiven Schulen

Against the backdrop of the recent political discourse on elite and excellence in the German education system, this paper examines how such constructions manifest themselves in programmatic concepts of schools and in the orientations of their pupils and their peers. They are reconstructed on the basis of a qualitative research project on educational careers of young people. This paper focuses on pupils and their peers at an elite school of sports and an international school. Firstly, the state of research on those types of school as well as on educational careers of their pupils will be presented. Secondly, the theoretical reference points and the methodological design of the study will be introduced. At the core of the paper is the analysis of the education related orientations of selected cases of young people and their peers: How do they position themselves towards elite and excellence in their individual and collective orientations and how is this relevant for processes of distinction and coherence building in the groups? In the resuming part of the paper, the results will be summarised and related to the state of research and the scientific discourse on elite and excellence.     

Narrative inquiry as travel study method: affordances and constraints

This article maps how narrative inquiry—the use of story to study human experience—has been employed as both method and form to capture cross-cultural learning associated with Western doctoral students’ travel study to eastern destinations. While others were the first to employ this method in the travel study domain, we are the first to comprehensively explore the affordances and constraints of the methodology and the possibilities it holds for illuminating knowledge developments, community growth, and identity transformations on the part of participating students. Story fragments illustrating each of these opportunities and challenges are drawn from the China Study Abroad Program, a program sponsored by the University of Houston’s Asian American Studies Center that has been underway since 1995. Affordances of the narrative inquiry research method include such things as detailed accounts of individuals in interaction with diverse people/places/things and explications of stories people live in and by. Accounts, which are “true for now,” as opposed to true for all time and the dangers of human fallibility form two examples of narrative inquiry’s constraints.     

Implementing web 2.0 tools in the classroom: Four teachers’ accounts

In this paper, four teachers shared their experiences using the following free Web 2.0 tools with their students: Jing, Wix, Google Sites, and Blogger. The teachers found that students reacted positively to lessons in which these tools were used, and also noted improvements they could make when using them in the future.